Those Who Do Not Know Their History

Today I opened the 7 March 2011 issue of TIME. On page 2, I encountered a letter which I shall reproduce below:

I always admire Klein's well-written and factual articles. However, I very much disagree with his statement that "strong armies create security, a necessary precursor for democracy." First, Egypt must solve its problems with strong government and decisive leadership, not an army. Second, this is a perfect opportunity for the U.S. to demonstrate its goodwill via the Peace Corps. Now is the opportunity to seize the moment to promote peace, which we failed to do in the 1970s. It is not too late.

Michael Sandomeno,
Lucerne, Switzerland

It provoked an undignified HMPH from me as my eyes scanned the last lines. Lucerne, Switzerland, really?

Here's some history most people forget. The Old Swiss Confederacy, founded 1291, was unbeaten in battle till 1515 at Marignano. They had the largest standing army in Europe, the most desired mercenaries, and the most lethal kill-rate. These soldiers were the best close-combat infantry in the world for centuries. The Swiss have been exporting mercenaries (including technocratic and economic ones) for 720 years now.

How do you think they became democratic? They did it by fighting a huge civil war, beating up the neighbouring states, and expanding unchecked (and uncheckable) for 224 years (see previous paragraph).

As for Lucerne, among the many nice things it is known for, it is known for a particularly horrendous weapon, the Lucerne hammer. This thing was designed to smash armour using a hammerhead which looks like modern lobster-cracking gear, a long spike, and a short beak—all mounted on a 2-metre pole.

The Swiss, in short, were not a peaceable bunch of yodellers stuck on ski resorts high up in central Europe. They were a dominant bunch who were well able to enforce their own idea of democratic neutrality by beating up anybody else who came their way. Only the mass proliferation of firearms stopped them in the end.

So, Mr Sandomeno, please spare us the Swiss cowbells. The Swiss have no business telling people that you can have democracy without bloody battles and large armies. And, of course, neither can the Americans (who to this day, like the Swiss use their history as an excuse to arm the populace).

Eastern Front

In the Great Patriotic War, the Russians had more than 30 million dead. The Americans had around 400,000. But somehow, the latter have hijacked World War 2, and when we think of it, we often forget the stirrings in the East, the nationalist movements, the fact that the War was not about democracy, but about the survival of different dreams. We forget it was not really very much about America at all.

Word of the Day: Adjutant

I recently came across this somewhat old-fashioned term (first used c. 1600) in the course of my research. I had thought this word (at least in the former colonies) to have disappeared along with the British Empire, but it seems to have been resurrected. In fact, my first experience of the word was when exposed to Kipling at a relatively young age.

The word 'adjutant' is possibly an adjective as well as a noun. It comes from Latin adiuvare, which literally means 'to add youthful vigour' (cf. 'rejuvenation', which means 'to restore youthful vigour'; see also Juventus FC). What's interesting is the context in which it was adopted into the English language. In English, it is almost only ever used in a military context.

What is that context? The Romans used the word adiutor for the officer who was the principle field admin support to the Commanding Officer. In the British army, this man is given a rank equivalent to that of captain and essentially was the battlefield controller of operations. As such, he is superior to all the other captains in a battalion's order of precedence.

Off the battlefield, the adjutant is the chief staff officer to a colonel or regimental commander. As such, in conjunction with the Regimental Sergeant Major, he handles awards, evaluations, ceremonies, and the other minutiae of a regiment's yearly routine. He stalks around, looking serious, and even may be called upon to handle discipline matters. Occasionally, this may lead to awkwardness, since he is technically outranked by majors, and yet closer to the Commanding Officer than they are.

Emplacement

It's funny watching the development of a siege mentality. You see the 'fortress of paranoia' begin to develop, with the inward massacres and the purges, the gulags and the gratuitous moral violence. You hear people repeating in a panicked tone, "My conscience is clear!" and some other people saying, "We did what we thought was right!" (even if they would never have known anything of the sort).

The guns are emplaced, but facing the wrong way. The planes are a fair number, but their quality is depressingly out-of-date. Two battleships show up, but are sunk without adequate cover. The errors multiply, the blame increases. Some poor Lieutenant-General will be screwed over for a situation not his fault but totally attributable to him by design. The reason we remember him now is that he was born on 26 Dec 1887, and in December, we remember the helpless dead.

The SPAA Sequence

This is a sequence that some of my more attentive students may remember. For a few years now I've been having to teach some sort of compressed philosophy course ostensibly leading to a more epistemological ('why do we think of this as knowledge') focus. But it occurs to me that there are a few helpful sequences that make certain distant ideas more understandable.

One of them is the SPAA sequence. A lot of people know it, although few people realise its significance. SPAA stands for Socrates-Plato-Aristotle-Alexander. It's an 'academic DNA' sort of sequence, in which the teacher and the student are linked. So Alexander was the student of Aristotle and so on.

But what's interesting is the narrow window through which each of these people is seen, now that we are so distant in time that it's like looking down the wrong end of a telescope. It leaves us with a bare-bones framework which cannot adequately reflect the genius of each individual (since we really can't see it all anyway) but yet is of some use. So here it is.

• Socrates asked questions with the intention of not finding a specific answer. "There are no real answers!"
• Plato, traumatised by that, decided that there must be definite answers, and tried to work them out. "There are absolute answers!"
• Aristotle pointed out that there must be two answers to every question, and if they were extreme answers, it would be best to stay in the middle. "The truth is in there!"
  
• Alexander, rather edgy at all this philosophy, decided that the answer to any philosophical question should be tried out practically, and proceeded to conquer half the known world. "The truth is out there!"

I'm sure there's a lesson there, somewhere. At this point, I must confess a bias. I like the name 'Alexander'; it means 'defender of men' in Greek. He was one of the case studies my father fed me with when I was a wee bairn, and what I liked about him was that he tried to minimise his own casualties by using strategic and tactical intelligence, speed, skill and timing. Unlike many philosophers of war, he actually committed himself to courses of action based on his answers to philosophical questions.

When presented with a complex knot (now known as the Gordian knot) and told that he would have to unravel it to pass, he drew his sword and unravelled it with one blow. Brutally decisive, but also in compliance with the terms of the problem. Most philosophers would have spent much time thinking of reasons to untie it or leave it be; mathematical philosophers would have been all knotted up in the heuristics of the untying or even of the structure of the knot.

I don't condone all of Alexander's actions or his lifestyle. But I do admire his ability to use philosophy as a practical basis for solving problems on the battlefield. He was one of the first to employ a tactical retreat to confound his foes, thus routing a superior force. The Battle of Gaugamela is particularly instructive; outnumbered, he won by having better-disciplined troops and playing on the battlefield psychology of a large mob led by a tyrant. (That's probably a bit unfair to Darius the 'Great King' of Persia, but that's what his troops thought of him.)

Alexander retreated his flanks and let Darius half-encircle him by using elite forces all over the place. Darius pursued and his troops got a little frustrated when Alexander's forces, compressed by the manoeuvre, failed to collapse. Alexander then punched through the spread-out Persians, using elite cavalry to rout them from behind. He could have slaughtered the lot, but he hung back to rescue his friend Parmenion, who had got into a bit of trouble. He won anyway.

Heatwave

Where I'm sitting right now, the average temperature is about 33°C and the droning of grasscutting equipment fills the distant air. It's a vengeful onslaught presaging a really hot summer. Or so you would think, if you hadn't just had a really cold rainy few days prior to this.

It's hard to think about higher average temperatures when you've been having the occasional bout of record-breaking lowest-ever local temperatures. It's hard to think about global warming when everyone seems to be wondering about nuclear fireballs. It's easy to think of American strategy in the Middle East as an aberration of foreign policy.

But the average temperature is going up, the desire for nuclear playthings likewise, and American strategy in the Middle East is something we've come to expect from certain kinds of administrations. Back in the latter part of the 20th century, America backed India with arms shipments (which India then used to absorb the smaller states of Goa, Hyderabad and so on) then switched to Pakistan as a counterbalance (and supplied them F-15s, believe it or not). Thus, the two big South Asian democracies (yes, India is indeed the largest democracy in the world) were put at each other's throats to the benefit of the US military-industrial complex.

Who do you think is to blame for the fact that both Pakistan and India have some kind of nuclear capability? Maybe China; it's convenient to blame them. But the first arms traders to make a killing in South Asia were the British, followed by the Russians and Americans. And the killing hasn't stopped.

I think the problem that Americans have in seeing all this is that Americans don't have a very detailed mental map of the world. The Onion's Our Dumb World: Atlas of the Planet Earth (73rd Edition) is a masterpiece of lampoonery directed at mainly American stereotypical perceptions. Unfortunately, the fragments which substitute for a mental map are indeed a lot like the funny bits lovingly assembled by The Onion's team.

And so outside my window, the heatwave continues. The haze rises off the ground, and you can see little of clarity beyond it. The drone of the grasscutting machines fills the air with white noise and green flecks. And everything hangs, uncertain.

Siege Projectors: A Primer

This is just an old post dug up from the pre-1990 halcyon days of my online existence. I think I wrote the original in 1981!

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Ballista: From the Greek word for 'thrower'. This device fired large bolts in a reasonably straight line. It was really a giant crossbow, relying on a combination of torsion and springs to store energy. The scorpion is a smaller version, still quite large, but operated by a single 'sniper'. In theory, a ballista could fire ten bolts, massing several kilograms each, per minute. The effective range was as high as 500m. With Roman technology, that would have been the norm, and their accuracy was impressive. With modern steel, a ballista should be able to fire lighter and stronger bolts over four times that distance.

Catapult: From the Greek word for 'flinger'. Another device using torsion to project a load in a ballistic trajectory. Although the catapult and the ballista were indistinguishable at some point in their common Greek military history, the catapult (and its kin, the onager and mangonel) evolved terminologically to be a sling-like device firing round shot. Siege catapults traditionally fired loads such as rocks with less than a hundred kilograms of mass. A slightly more advanced grasp of mathematics was required than that needed for the operation of a ballista.

Trebuchet: From an Old French root, meaning 'to throw over'. A device using a counterweight mechanism to rotate an opposing arm, which would fling the load in a trajectory dictated by the mechanism design. The trebuchet was invented by the Chinese in the 3rd Century BC, and used by the English in the 11th Century to devastating effect; the machine could throw loads of 150 kilograms more than 200 metres. One such device, the Warwolf, so intimidated Scottish defenders that they tried to surrender when they saw it being assembled.

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I actually wrote more on onagers, mangonels, and scorpions; over the years, I simplified things a lot in my mind. It helped that my illustrious father was (and still is) a military historian. Plenty of source material there!

The War

I don't normally sell movies, TV series, stuff like that. And while I'm a fan of history as a discipline and a useful, entertaining area of knowledge, I tend to keep that part of my life reasonably private.

But Ken Burns's The War deserves advertising. Go take a look. It wasn't a Good War. It might have been a Just War. Whatever it was, it was the worst war of all time. Not as much senseless death and blood as the First World War, but horror. Lots of it.